Well, for a few months now I have been planning on building a new, main PC for myself (my current main machine is about 4 years old now). Been looking over lots of articles, specs, reviews, etc. and finally settled on the parts I wanted and ordered them. They got dropped off by UPS yesterday and I'm excited to get going on this. It's going to be a Windows 7 Professional 64 bit box with an Ivy bridge i5 processor, 8 gigs of RAM, an amazing ASUS motherboard, a 180GB solid state drive, and so on. Should run very fast - of course. Details below:
MB ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe Z77 LGA1155
Intel i5 3570K
GSkill F3-12800CL9D-8GB
EVGA GTX570 R
Corsair 180GB SSD
Corsair PSU-850W
Rico... congrats on the new purchase...are you building it over the weekend?
Oh, I forgot to mention I may put the Mac OS X on this too either using a dual boot method or VMware. The other option is to turn my old PC into a Hackintosh. Haven't decided yet which is the best way to go.
Quote from: MARKO on June 30, 2012, 10:13:43 AM
Rico... congrats on the new purchase...are you building it over the weekend?
Hope to do that. Today is a bit busy but I may try to start putting the parts in place at least.
a warm day a cold beer and techy stuff... love it.
Nice! :metallica:
Quote from: MARKO on June 30, 2012, 10:43:36 AM
a warm day a cold beer and techy stuff... love it.
Agreed!
Now, I just need to figure out a way to connect the flux capacitor to generate the 1.21 gigawatts this baby will need to allow me to time travel too!
1.21 gigawatts?! - Dr. Brown & Marty - Back to the future (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cYgRnfFDA#)
Quote from: Rico on June 30, 2012, 10:15:17 AM
Oh, I forgot to mention I may put the Mac OS X on this too either using a dual boot method or VMware. The other option is to turn my old PC into a Hackintosh. Haven't decided yet which is the best way to go.
Have fun Hackintoshing. Did that for a while myself.
Quote from: Dangelus on June 30, 2012, 11:11:54 AM
Quote from: Rico on June 30, 2012, 10:15:17 AM
Oh, I forgot to mention I may put the Mac OS X on this too either using a dual boot method or VMware. The other option is to turn my old PC into a Hackintosh. Haven't decided yet which is the best way to go.
Have fun Hackintoshing. Did that for a while myself.
Which route did you take Dan? Dual boot? Did you have any hardware issues?
Rico.... did you ever consider an i5 or i7 iMAC? Pricey but what apiece of hardware!
Quote from: MARKO on June 30, 2012, 11:46:30 AM
Rico.... did you ever consider an i5 or i7 iMAC? Pricey but what apiece of hardware!
Considered, but I need a speedy, top notch Windows PC much more for what I do.
Quote from: Rico on June 30, 2012, 11:23:27 AM
Quote from: Dangelus on June 30, 2012, 11:11:54 AM
Quote from: Rico on June 30, 2012, 10:15:17 AM
Oh, I forgot to mention I may put the Mac OS X on this too either using a dual boot method or VMware. The other option is to turn my old PC into a Hackintosh. Haven't decided yet which is the best way to go.
Have fun Hackintoshing. Did that for a while myself.
Which route did you take Dan? Dual boot? Did you have any hardware issues?
Yeah I dual booted, well technically I just installed to a separate HDD and manually chose which to boot up as it was simpler than configuring the bootloader.
There are always hardware issues. You'll most likely need to install custom kexts (Apple for drivers) for audio and graphics but you might get lucky. Some motherboards work with "vanilla" installs.
I had Snow Leopard then Lion running pretty much perfectly after a few hours research.
Some good resources where you can research the compatibility of your hardware:
http://tonymacx86.com/ (http://tonymacx86.com/)
http://insanelymac.com/ (http://insanelymac.com/)
Depending on what you want to do you may just want to run a VM. You can acquire Pre-built virtualbox and VMware images pretty easily (but not exactly legal) although they are tricky to do build yourself. They run pretty quickly but you don't get graphics acceleration so a lot of apps (like Pages) don't run and USB mics dont work well.
I'm contemplating converting my Doghouse over to an SSD. Just not sure what size I'll need. I was aiming for 250 gig with a terabyte 'data' drive. I'll be interested to hear how the 180 serves you as a system drive. Will you be putting a bigger spinning disk in there as well?
Yes, there will be other hard disc drives for games, video, etc. For a system drive and a few common programs 180 GB should be fine. Bigger is always nice, but there start to jump in price quite a bit as you increase size on an SSD.
180Gb is MORE than enough for a system drive and all. All content drives should be physical drives anyway so that sounds like a neat setup.
Yeah I agree on the price spike, for some reason I get real nervous about running out of space on my system drive. Then again if I go an look on my MacBook (which hasn't gathered all the cruft my desktop has) I only have about 90 gigs in use there even with all my podcast files, so I guess 180 would be sufficient for an OS and some applications. Time to start looking for SSD deals!
You just have to be selective in what goes on the main drive. I usually only put the critical stuff there - like the OS, some often used programs like Office, etc. I'm hoping to build the new machine later on today after I get some yard work done. Should be fun!
If you just keep your multimedia (iTunes) library and videogames off the main drive, you should be fine, for the most part. :)
Very nice setup Rico, wish I could upgrade to an i5 or i7 processor.
King
Yeps. I keep my music and most big apps off the main drive.
I'm putting her together right now. The heavy, steel case comes with wheels too! How awesome is that?!?! :)
Well, got the new PC assembled. Putting all the parts together took longer than normal, but I took my time and had to move some drives and stuff over from the old PC. A few hiccups along the way, but she's up and running now. Installing Windows 7 64-bit on an SSD took like 10 minutes! And this machine is fast! Even accessing my old, spinning drives is very quick now (faster SATA controller). I took a bunch of pics during the building process that I will post up soon. Now comes the big part of installing things and moving junk over to the new machine. But overall things seem to be in good shape. :)
Looking forward to seeing the pics. I am starting to think about a new machine for myself, this might be the way to go. Back in the day I used to build out servers, so it shouldn't be too bad. No more setting jumpers on HD's - that takes all the challenge out of a build! :)
Even without jumpers you need to set, there are new challenges. The motherboard I got has an UEFI Bios and I'm still learning the optimum settings to tweak everything to. I really like the modular power supply. I think I'll do an Attic of My Mind show maybe on the 4th of July about the build. That should be fun to do. I have a ton of programs to move over but all seems great so far.
Finally put up some of the pics I took last weekend building my new baby. All is working well so far. Still tweaking things some, installing stuff and so on but I'm very happy with this new machine. Glad I did it finally after spending months thinking it over, choosing parts, etc.
Pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/treksf/sets/72157630484174278/ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/treksf/sets/72157630484174278/)